Tabs or Spaces? (Soundcheck Question) - Computerphile
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ธ.ค. 2019
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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. More at www.bradyharan.com
Next question should be curly brackets on same line of function vs next line
Sloth Armstronk was about to make a comment about this lol
K&R style
define function{
content;
}
I know it's silly but I will die on this hill
Simple. Next line.
Why? So you can add another statement by just inserting a line, you don’t need to edit the last line to move the closing brace.
Has to be next line.
Function a()
{
// Code
}
I know im in the minority but the other style bugs me. If i have to take charge of a new script that was written by someone else, this is the first thing i have to change with it. Its not being petty, i really find it makes it a lot easier to see what blocks belong to each other, especially when other coders dont care much about indentation.
Tabs or Spaces?
Others: Tabs
Prof. Brailsford: Ohhh I didn't expect that question... Ohhh oh Lord no...
And he actually gave a sensible answer. Tabs are designed for moving to a tab stop, but you might not trust whatever’s operating over the text to deal with them correctly.
It’s the only reason not fully negated by the fact that nowadays we all tend to use decent editors.
"Ohhh oh Lord no" is in fact, the only correct answer to that question.
Frank Harwald no tabs is
He's a professor, so he doesn't program any more. ;-)
@@Thalario while we have decent editors, you still have to watch out not to save a file that uses _both_ on the same line - therein lies madness
Every other developer: Doesn't matter
Python developer: THIS IS A LIFE AND DEATH QUESTION!
I've worked with at least 4 different programming languages (discounting HTML, CSS and its preprocessors as "programming languages") where the code style violations would actually make the build fail. So not just Python.
@@DominikMarczuk Style doesn't break the program on many of the popular SE used languages. Python uses a style as a syntax, I *personally* believe that shouldn't happen. Style varies from Organisation to organisation sometimes it's even departmental.
Where I work we outsourced a project and the company wrote code who's style and naming convention doesn't match our department's standards. Yh, we weren't happy about it but the software did it's job and did it well. Will we use them again? Depends on how desperate we are.
Don't get me wrong I don't hate Python I just have a complicated relationship with it. Honestly I can't truly hate it because it's what got me invested in programming.
@@TheHaters112 I do understand that languages such as Python and Ruby, or maybe CoffeeScript and SASS on the frontend side, use indentation to denote nested code blocks. But does that mean that using true tabs will actually break the syntax? (it's a question; I guenuinely don't know)
@@DominikMarczuk I tested it in the python interpreter. Eight spaces are apparently equivalent to one tabulator - even when my terminal shows one tab four characters wide.
To be clear: You can actually use tabs, but you shouldn't mix tabs and spaces, because it looks weird when tabs aren't eight characters long. Also, pep-8 recommends to use four (true) spaces.
@@kevinbee4617 pep-8 is my master
So the answers are:
Tabs, -spaces- tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, "I just press the tab button and hope for the best", tabs, tabs, tabs, "it depends on the tabbing mechanism", tabs
Except I am willing to bet that most of them use spaces, but don't know it. The people who said that they use tabs because "it's faster than mashing the spacebar over and over" particularly.
Yeah, sometimes it indents too much.
@@paulk.8681 Yeah, but I think the question isn't what is actually written in the code, it's what they use for writing it.
@@oliverlemke465 I really really hope no one thinks preferring spaces over tabs actually means preferring hitting the space bar over hitting the tab key… Text editors have been able to insert spaces on a Tab key hit since, what, 20 years?
@Nico Braun Most editors CAN (not will) substitute tabs with spaces. If that's the default behavior of an editor out of the box, it's a bug.
Using spaces over tabs is idiotic regardless of what key you're pressing to insert them. Tabs are far more flexible and efficient.
"Tabs or spaces?"
Prof Brailsford: "Give me a week and I'll have the thesis in your inbox."
lol
I love when a video can tell me which computerphile personalities I can no longer trust.
I think too many of them have only worked in academics
@@sentjojo yeeeup
Glad to see Moriarty prefers tabs... I prefer his politics too! Trump is a spaces guy I can tell.
Spaces its to mentally disabled programmers, never had trouble with compatibility with spaces, what IDE these people is using? vanilla notepad?
@@scowell Make Academia Great Again! ;-)
Real question is:
for () {
}
Or for ()
{
}
the latter
First one.
type the first because its fastest, have autoformat convert into w/e they want at work/uni
for :
😅
The first for control flow like if while for, the second for blocking like namespace, class, function
"Do you use Tabs or Spa-"
"I USE ARCH LINUX"
btw
huh, now i want there to be a (meta)distro called "Tabs or Spaces," I wonder what the gimmick would be..
@@markkeilys it randomly picks an indentation style and size for you(tabs vs spaces, width of tab/number of spaces), and forces that value on you by hardcoding it into every piece of editing software while building your system.
I'm vegan
@@c0smo709 Found the vegan
Next is vim or emacs
Or nano
(Tbh I prefer vim)
...and while you're at it, ask the emacs users, if they happen to keep a stash of 'space cadetes keyboards', had the fundamental structure of their hands surgically altered, or how else they do it!?
nano
I prefer nano because I never read any documentation but I heard vim is nicer if you're used to it
@@SuperTux20 pico/nano doesn't have the same global file manipulation capabilities as vi. I regularly use vi to take exported data from one application to reformat it for another, and sometimes those files are tens of thousands of lines long.
vi is a huge pain to learn but once learned it's a lot more powerful to use.
I press tabs 4 times
cursed XD
Chad move
16 spaces
i have my tab size set to 0.5
you are cursed
I press the tab key, which makes four spaces.
I originally used tab = tab until my boss complained and said I should use spaces. I didn't really care one way or the other so I just set my editor to do four spaces for a tab.
+
It surprised me how many people in the video thought that using spaces involves manually pressing the spacebar. The reason people use spaces is so that the indendation is consistent for everyone working on the project, so that eg. hanging function parameter lists are aligned correctly.
Modern editors naturally make this easy on both fronts, allowing you to change whether pressing tab produces spaces or tabs, and to customize the tab width (anything except 4 is heresy).
I also set my editor to do 4 spaces for a tab. I appreciate the consistency it creates across my projects, and anyone who collaborates with me tends to follow the same convention so it's nice.
@@brnddi agreed. Wtf is wrong with them
@@brnddi
> anything except 4 is heresy
And this is why choosing tabs invites another holywar. One can prefer tab size 4, others use 8. Somebody can indent with tabs align with spaces, others use tabs for alignment too. Latter cause formatting issues if their preferred tab size is 3 or some other number.
In teams it's easier to force everyone to use spaces. Then code looks the same to everyone.
1:29 - He sums up the advantages of tabs pretty well:
a) Tabs allows everyone to view the code at their own preferred indentation-width. Some people prefer 4-character-long indents, some prefer 8-long, some 3-long, etc. Using tabs for indentation, everyone can set tab to look however long they want in their editor and see the indentation-width they prefer without having to change the code.
b) Smaller file sizes. A single tab character is less bytes than 2 or more space characters.
That said, I prefer mixed (tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment).
a) Breaks aligment.
b) Nobody, i mean really nobody cares about a few bytes more.
Can you explain how it breaks alignment?
@@himpta if you're using both tabs and spaces changing the tab width will brake alignment
@@azmah1999 It will not. You use tabs for indenting and spaces to the right of the indentation for alignment.
@@humm535 It will when you will want to align to what's on the last or next line. Convert them tabs to spaces.
I feel like a lot of answers did miss the point. It is not about pressing a key once or multiple times, that's just something your editor should take care of.
It is about you want the tab character or multiple spaces. So I'd say:
1. Use the thing that is recommended in Style Guides or Best Practices (e.g. PEP-8 says 4 spaces are preferred)
2. But use the thing that is already used
3. Be consistent about it and make sure other contributers know how to configure their editors and provide a modeline (vim, and emacs probably can use it, too)
PEP-8 states 4 spaces, not 4 tabs.
@@Casanova646 Arg, sorry, for that. Ofc it's spaces!
@@Syphdias You weren't wrong, 4 tabs is just hardcore mode. Gives you the negatives of both, and on top of that you editor probably won't like it.
@@lost4468yt He was wrong. In his original statement he claimed that PEP-8, the Python Style Guide, called for the use of 4 tabs (that was of course a perfectly acceptable mix-up, but whatever). And while I'm being nitpicky: 4 tabs isn't just hardcore mode, it's totally unnecessary, and I'd go so far as to say it's bad style, because the tab is a character intended for indentation. Using 4 tabs would just mean you were on the fourth level of indentation. And most, if not all, editors are totally fine with that. (At least Vim is, and you should use vim, because it is the only acceptable editor). Ah, by the way, did I mention I use VIM?
Edit:
I totally agree with Syphdias, just to be clear.
In summary: use a .editorconfig file.
Dammit, spaces people aren't hammering the spacebar eight times to indent! Editors have bindings on the tab key to put the appropriate number of spaces.
The thing is that back in the olden days it was just tha, the tab meant tab and if you wanted spaces you hammered space. And a lot of the computer scientists who work at eg. universities doing research are still using the tools from those days. Because it works great for those use-cases, less so for us who produce software at larger scales.
Seriously have these people never used an editor?
How many spaces is appropriate?
So, basically, Tabs...
@@kaustubhmurumkar2670 I'm not saying the other arguments in favor of tabs are wrong. I'm just saying that this particular one is not grounded in reality.
To be fair, I completely understand Professor Brailsford's opinion, because it also matters if you're just talking about indentation, or also alignment: Tabs are great for indenting code, but you would want to use spaces for comments after the code. Spaces are for fine-granularity alignment.
Man, I miss comments... my workplace explicitly bans all comments, with the ideology that code should be self-explanatory and if you need comments, then your code isn't clear enough. I get what they mean, but... I miss comments :(
@@IceMetalPunk Code can only do what it does. Comments that describe what the code does are obviously superfluous, but ones that explain _why_ it is doing what it is doing should be essential. How could code ever be “self-explanatory” in that way? It cannot.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I mean, I agree with you in many cases. But there's also many cases where following the logic of the code is enough to understand why it's doing what it's doing. It depends on what the code is implementing and how.
@@IceMetalPunk I never understood that kind of people. I'm a maintenance programmer myself and let my tell you: no matter how amazing and self-documenting your code is, comments make my job a lot easier.
Professor Brailsford's answer is wrong in every respect. tabs should _only_ be used for indentation. using tabs for post-indentation alignment is always an error.
I understand the argument that the whole point of tabs is that they indicate indentation as well as allowing editors to display them differently depending on style. I'm sympathetic to it in principle. But in some languages, including all of my favorites, you need to use spaces to get your formatting right.
E.g., Haskell. In the standard way to style Haskell, there are tons of times when you two lines that need to be lined up with each other, to the exact character. This is called alignment, and since tab sizes vary depending on the editor, you need spaces for it.
This doesn't mean you can't use tabs too-in principle, you could use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment (so each line would begin with however many tabs you need to determine the context and scope, followed by however many spaces you need to make it visually align with the previous line).
But the mixed style has an issue too. Whitespace in Haskell is semantically significant; indentation determines the program's structure (unless you use the optional braces/semicolons style, which I have never once seen outside of a Haskell manual, where it's usually relegated to a footnote). This means to answer questions like "what is the scope of this variable", you need an unambiguous interpretation of when one line is further right than another. If you arbitrarily mix tabs and spaces, this is undefined.
Hence, the best way to code Haskell is to use spaces for everything. That's why plenty of Haskell editors don't even have an _option_ for tabs, instead automatically inserting spaces when you hit . In fact, there's even a compiler option to warn or error if there are any tabs in your source code.
So yeah, if a language involves neither semantically significant whitespace nor stylistic alignment, then I guess I have a weak preference for tabs. But in some languages (again, including all of my personal favorites), spaces dominate.
They are answering 2 different questions: Tabs or spaces in the file vs. press tab or spam space bar.
My personal preference is tabs for indention & spaces for aligning (past the first graphic character on a line). This way, code automatically adjusts to the indention preference each person has set in their editor without messing up alignment. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people I’ve worked with are against using tabs at all because of the issues of using them with alignment, so I’ve adapted to using spaces for indention. And my editor is configured to insert spaces when I hit tab.
Even better are flexible tabs where a smart editor lines up things aligned with tabs whatever the indention size is set to. But too few editors support that.
That's also my personal preference. It also makes the most sense to me. I use tabs for indention and then spaces when there are multiline commands, for example multiple parameters for a function call spread over multiple lines. I then align the parameters using spaces.
This approach has always seemed the ideal solution, but I’ve never got around to configure an editor to do this automatically when hitting the tab key.
@@cjk32cam The problem is that someone else who doesn't have an editor configured right will inevitably screw it up again later :(
@@platinummyrr The same applies to spaces as well.
@@cjk32cam Emacs has a plugin for it (obiviously) called smart-tabs-mode
I’m disappointed no one mentioned accessibility. Resizable tabs are important for devs with bad vision or tiny monitors. It also makes the “how many spaces to indent” question mostly subjective as long as your style guide accounts for it.
The video we all actually wanted.
Tabs for indentation that signifies structure, spaces for alignment.
Physicist: How does matter interact? Where do we come from?
Computer scientist: Tabs or spaces?
Physics: Finding order in chaos.
Computer science: Rigorously defined chaos.
Yevhenii Diomidov I like your answers
The strange thing is that there's clearly a general preference for tabs but most coding standards and guidelines use spaces.
"Most coding standards and guidelines are using spaces" wat?
Probably because you can emulate tabs with spaces but not the other way around.
@@keithkaranu4258 that is like designing only for 800x600 screens :D
@@GerardoOscarJT You seem pretty uninformed. Look up some stuff and then come back and comment :P
@@GerardoOscarJT the python pip is spaces, ruby is two spaces, the air bnb styleguide (seems to be the defacto JS style guide) is spaces. These are the ones I can think of without research.
In theory: Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. As noted in the video, tabs semantically mean indentation and allow for per-user (viewing) customization. In practice: spaces for both, because people (especially those who are less experienced?) seem to screw up tabs in copy-and-paste, etc. How many spaces? I use 4 to keep things from being too wide, except in HTML where I use 2 because it has so many levels of indentation. When using spaces for indentation, your editor should be configured so the tab key inserts spaces, of course.
100% agree.
Except I don’t care about people messing up enough to ditch my tabs. Tabs, viewed 8 characters wide, for indentation, of course!
If they can't handle copy/pasting, they shouldn't be employed as coders.
If they use spaces over tabs, they shouldn't be employed as coders.
Ruining your code style just because some moron can't copy paste properly is unacceptable
Why do so many people think that you actually press the space bar when using spaces?
Because academics have an academic understanding of coding not a practical one.
Yeah wth is this nonsense. I’ve never manually added spaces. Tabs are idempotent with spaces and otherwise chaotic without.
I'm totally confused by this question, the fact that 33 people have liked it, and the fact that 2 people have responding showing that they comprhended it... All I read is "why do so many people think you actually press the pedal when driving a car". How on Earth does that make any sense...
He's not asking how you want your tab key to respond, because like multiple people mentioned it's pretty irrelevant. Some very proficient coders do use space to indent their code, and refuse to use the tab key.
@@-dubu if you watch the video, multiple people answer saying they dont like spaces because you'd have to press space bar multiple times, while you might be right, I don't think your comment actually makes much sense in this context.
In over twenty years of professional software development I don’t think I’ve ever been on a team where the standard was anything other than four spaces, no hard tabs. Obviously I hit the tab key, and the editor quietly converts it to the requisite number of spaces, no-one complains at code review, and life goes on.
(I am now wondering if I subconsciously selected jobs where people do the right thing though 😉)
In the nearly 40 years that I've been using C in professional software development, I've had to follow several conventions:
* indent aligned on 4 columns
* indent aligned on 2 columns
* indent aligned on 3 columns
* indent aligned on column 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 22, 24, ....
As for '\t' vs. spaces, the editor takes care of it. In many cases, the rules allowed hard tabs only between the end of the code and the beginning of the comments. The reason for this was to make printing the code more consistent. If you change the tab stops from the original formatting, the alignment of the text indented with tabs is lost.
An amazing amount of coding style guidelines go back to when we used punch cards and serial terminals that had tab stop settings that could be changed over the serial line. For punched cards, there were no tab characters, however serial terminals could handle horizontal tab as a single control character.
The horizontal tab control character was used to minimize the number of characters sent over the serial line at 300, 1200, or if you were really lucky, 9600 characters per second. The terminal driver could be set to pass HT through or to emulate HT; when emulating HT, the tab stops were set in the driver itself so it could expand HT into the right number of spaces. This requires the driver to know the position of the cursor on the current line and expand tabs appropriately; it's a pain. "stty -tabs" in a Unix environment will tell the driver to interpret HT characters rather than sending them to the terminal. On at least one system I've worked on, the lp (line printer) driver allowed setting the individual tab-stops that it would emulate. though I don't recall how many columns it allowed you to specify before it used a default interval for anything after that.
Of course Professor Brailsford saw it from many directions.
and with criteria, and giving a full explanation and comprehending the question; some of them actually thought when asked that developers hit the space bar literally for spaces
I'm a tiny bit surprised that no one said "both": tabs for indentation, and spaces for formatting. If you have a while statement four levels in, but had multiple conditions that needed to be put in one line, you tab for levels in, then fill in the rest with spaces, to get to the parentheses. That way, the tabs show how things are indented, but the remaining spaces maintain the association that the conditions have with the while statement.
Then you run into the problem of tabs being a different length in different editors. You might have a very fun time with four levels of indent and it looks very lovely in your favourite editor. But then somebody else want to read it, and they have eight levels of indent. All of a sudden your spaces don't match up at all.
darthmonks No, that's wrong. That's the whole point of using both, to avoid this issue.
If you use tabs only for indentation and spaces only for formatting/alignment, it will work for everyone, regardless of their current tab width.
Consider this pseudo-code (substitute "-> " for tab and "•" for a space):
int func() {
-> int a = 0;
->
-> for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
-> -> if (a > 0 &&
-> -> ••••b != 9 &&
-> -> ••••isTrue()) {
-> -> -> doSomething();
-> -> }
-> }
->
-> return 2;
}
The best standard I have come across is one (8-position) tab for the first indentation level, then indentations every four characters. Fill up with tabs as required, then if needed pad last level with four spaces. It is easy to read, easy to find functions, easy to see indentation levels and conserves line width fairly well. And it’s beautiful. 😊
Benny Löfgren That's awful imo. Indentation should be consistent, don't mix tabs and spaces in indentation.
If you really want this style, just get an IDE that lets you configure the width of the first indentation level.
4:06
I use the tab key to indent my code and the editor inserts spaces everywhere, and to be more precise tab formats my code rather than merely inserting spaces because it might remove indentation levels or add several of them with one key press. I don't have to hit the space key several times. I also prefer tabs because often time the indentation I need is based on the length of the functions written on the line above and it may not align with the 4 space indentation of tabs.
After giving it a watch, I'm very surprised that the majority said "tabs". And by the number of people who seemingly don't realize that pressing the "tab" key does not necessarily mean inserting a "tab" character. For personal code, it's perfectly fine to use whatever, unless the language is indentation-sensitive (f.ex. Haskell, Python). But for collaborative code, if _that one guy_ uses tabs, it messes up everything for everyone else. And yes, one could enforce using either tabs or spaces with git hooks and style guides and whatnot. But then again, spaces are way more consistent across all the different editors and other software, like diffing tools, version control systems, etc.
I would be interested to know if more industry focused people would tend to say spaces. I prefer it because it's easier to work over multiple IDEs, merge tools, etc. Also variable tab sizes fails in situations like aligning comments at the end of a line. To be fair, I'd always press tab and then rely on the IDE to fix it for me.
Just use tabs for indentation and spaces if you want to align within the line. That way you can change the tabstop without modifying your parameter alignment.
With the intelligence that IDEs now have, the question can be misinterpreted... are we talking about the actual unicode/ascii character or the keyboard key being pressed? Nowadays, 99% of developers press the tab key, and what gets written is dependent on what is the default for the IDE, or what is idiomatic of the programming language. Devs who work in teams use project-wide configurations, so even if half of the devs want tabs but the config uses spaces, then spaces are written.
The ASCII character.
Vim automatically converts the tab key to spaces anyway if you configure it wrong.
I hate that when my precious tabs require four backspaces to delete. Almost as bad as programming in proportional fonts.
@@scowell Most IDEs use the "Shift + Tab" shortcut to remove an indent; especially useful for when spaces are used for indents. I prefer spaces, so this comes really handy.
disclaimer: I prefer spaces, so I might seem biased, but...
Almost everyone in the video that said they prefer tabs claimed it was less button-presses, but that's false. It takes exactly as many presses on the tab-key, no matter what you set it to input.
One said that its nice to ppl reading later on, but editors nowadays can easily format to users specification with spaces too (although usually needs to be done with a manual command), and there are edge-cases where if tabs were used and another user displays them differently, stuff stops lining up correctly.
The only real difference is probably that tabbing with spaces can let you force the indent to 'weird' intervals when needed (though you might need to edit your editor to allow for it, as some make backspace equal to shift+tab by default instead). ie. when you continue a prior line and decide to indent it 1.5 times, to signify that it isn't a control-flow indent but rather continues the expression from prior line.
Except I am fairly sure I have seen one ide that knew the language that would be used for it, and identified such continuations of prior lines, letting the user to tab like normal but have it displayed differently to achieve the same result.
And even if your ide doesnt, there is nothing stopping you (well.. python does) from using both: tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. Rather, many ppl argue that "Both" is the desired answer to this question.
tl;dr the guy that said it doesn't really matter with modern editors is the one who seems to actually know what he is talking about.
ps: the reason I use spaces is mostly because I remember horrible stuff happening when using languages with significant whitespaces back when I used tabs. They.. did not like tabs (was either haskell or python, dont remember which. maybe both). Also because I don't like the aesthetics of seeing a line followed by dots, as seems to be how most ides like displaying whitespaces (tabs and spaces respectively).
Unless there's a global standard and something like gofmt or rustfmt, then tabs, for one main reason: I like 4 spaces, but I know not everyone else does. If you don't like 4-spaces, change your editor config so your tabs aren't 4 spaces! Your spacing preference isn't my problem and my spacing preference isn't yours!
Project managers usually prefer spaces in order to assert their dominance.
I'm a weirdo that prefers a tabstop of 3, which literally nobody would accept if I used spaces. But if I use tabs, you can't even tell that I use a tabstop of 3, because your editor's setting of 2 or 4 is just applied to the text. There's no trace of my editor preferences in the file. It's great! I have no idea why anyone does anything else.
@@killerbee.13 yep, 3 is a golden number. 2 is too tight, 4 is too wide.
Project managers usually prefer spaces to insure a successful project
Your "main reason" does not actually speak for spaces OR tabs, you could rewrite it: "I like tabs, but I know not everyone else does."
Soundcheck questions are awesome. It's really entertaining hearing all the different opinions.
The most alienating message of this video to me is, how people seem to use editors, which force them to type either spaces OR tabs multiple times in succession by hand!?
Haha, I really like that almost all of them are in team tabs and that even the spaces guy in the end changed his opinion. Also: It's great that he uses Emacs.
My tab button is just a macro for 4 spaces
You monster.
I hope that's just within your editor and not system wide?
Indeed - when the editor is set to insert spaces when you press tab, you can get other intelligent behaviour like "I highlighted text, I want the tab key to increase the indent of the highlighted lines". If it's a system-wide macro, it's "I highlighted text, I want the tab key to replace it entirely with 4 space characters"
Why? Just... why? Joke or not, I know some people actually do this. What's the point?
I just discover this format, really clever. You get a nice natural soundcheck and at the same time get a survey, i'm gonna remember that if anytime I make a series.
I've read an interesting thread on twitter a few time ago :
Someone was saying he would prefer spaces for no particular reason. Then he realized that someone of his team was visually deficient, and everytime he pulled from git repo, he had to convert every spaces to tab, set tabs aspect to 1 space and zoom as f to have something he could read. Then he would convert to spaces before he pushed to git.
Main reason why to use tabs, it's easier for people with visual deficiency to use the code :)
Not sure I'm following. He converts every space to a tab, and then sets tab width to 1? How does this change anything visually?
@@kevinorr54 if you zoom and have 4 white spaces on the left, the way he had to zoom make it a huge space on the left. Having tabs allowed him to make it the same blank space as one space, which was more comfortable to read.
In a way, i don't really care as i read 4 spaces the same as one tab on my computer. Just hearing of a visually deficient prefering tabs over spaces for his own comfort was the only time i've heard a valid argument in the war spaces against tabs, and i just felt like sharing :)
@@zyighzag4050 Oh! I see. He effectively makes it so that n spaces take the width of 1 space. I guess that's an argument in favor of the tabs+spaces style (I can't believe I'm saying this)
set tab size to 1 and press 4 time
😈hahaha there's a prank in there somewhere
Congratulations. You managed to find the solution that makes both camps unhappy.
@@Baekstrom my intention exactly ;)
use > indention
The real question is: which tab size? #team4
Always 4 :)
Psychopaths use 3 or 5
VIM users use 8
and that is axactly the problem with tab
@@galier2 how is this a problem?
@@galier2 I would argue that's the benefit of tab. If you like 4 and I like 2 then I set my editor for 2, you set yours for 4, and everyone is happy. But if we use spaces, then my 2 is too tight for you, and your 4 is too spread out for me. From there, battle lines are drawn, armies of software developers choose sides, and we take out the entire internet as we battle whether 2 or 4 spaces is appropriate.
Moral of the story: use tabs - save the internet.
P.S. Tux Penguin is right - only psychopaths use 3 or 5
Yes
When I have a choice, tabs. The fact that most great text editors let you choose the indentation size is a great mechanism so that people with different expectations can get what they want.
Bash scripting HATES too many tabs. Spaces are always safe
agreed. *Spaces are always safe.*
Tabs bring chaos.
just set your editor to interpret 4 spaces as a tab and everyone can be happy and use whatever they want :)
What's up with all these presumably computer literate people thinking that the people who prefer spaces mash the space bar?
Because you end up doing it. You like to pretend that the editor takes care of everything but if you observe your coding critically you'll notice the amount of indentation tinkering you do.
@@AnttiBrax Wrong, with vscode I use tab and shift+tab exclusively for indentation. Most of the time vscode auto-indents based on if I just pressed enter after a curly brace
@@RPGillespie What about the times you accidentally hit your cursor 1 character before the start of your line? Or you select a couple of your indenting spaces? I'm 100% sure you've encountered this at least once.
@@spronkey VSCode auto-intents so I rarely need to physically press tab or shift-tab. But when I do, it's usually block-level operations (highlighting a block of code and intenting or unindenting the entire block). Also, how is accidentally highlighting a few leading spaces any different from accidentally highlighting a leading tab?
@@spronkey Not if you use your editor properly. Don't use the mouse to move the cursor: use the key that brings you to the beginning of the line.
Fascinating topic. Well done, guys. Cheers!
holywar.exe
Mark Randall
> mfw the world ends because people think tabs < spaces
If only all conflicts were as benign as nerd conflicts. :-\
holywar.sh
holywar.py
There is no holy war here. There are only those that are right (TABS), and those that will soon fertilize the fields (spaces).
I am freaking out about the guy who said 1 tab = 3 spaces. What kind of tabs is he using?!?
You can change the tab size, some people have 2/3, but I believe the normal is 4 spaces per tab
Some editors have soft tabs (actually spaces) and you can set the amount of spaces
I know, right?!
I have 1 tab = 3 space at VS Code.
Obviously tabs should be measured in points, or ex, not in spaces.
Is that quad spaces?
[holy war mode activated]
Tabs make so much more sense. Their width can be customized, you can skip through indentation levels with a single key press and there is no confusion between 3 and 4 spaces.
Also, the curly brace goes on a new line.
The issue becomes, what if you are trying to align things at the end of the line(like comments) and the beginnings have different layers of indention. With customizable tab lengths, the alignment will be off, so forcing a fixed tab width becomes important for a project. Which is why hitting the tab to place x number of spaces is generally best on large teams as the IDE will auto add spaces to the next tab layer.
You do realize that the curly brace means different things in different languages right?
@@mavoc3094 Elastic tabstops (how tab should really work) fixes all those issues
@@user-zz6fk8bc8u Elastic tabstops does not solve the issue when lines of code with various levels of leading indentation need to have parts of their code be lined up.
some code //lined up comments
more code //lined up comments
more code //lined up comments
etc
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. Though obv use whatever standard the project you're working on uses.
My problem with spaces is that if I press left next to an indent, I get sent one character left rather than to the previous indent. Most editors probably have a setting or plugin to change this, but it's almost never default
You can tell how long someone has been writing code by how quickly and fiercely they answer this question.
Firstly, most of people who answered don't really know that using tabs in most programming focused text editors will actually transform tabs into a pre-configured number of spaces. So almost half of the answers don't even make sense. Secondly, although I personally use spaces (through pressing the TAB button), tabs are more semantically correct to be used, since you have 1 indentation character per indentation level, and you can leave the actual interpretation of "how many spaces does an indentation level take" to the person reading/creating the code.
I use the physical tabs button to insert 4 spaces for my code through the editor. But I would use spaces to align it further for something like one liner getters and setters. It gives me a lot of precision to organise my code to however I want.
I used to use the tab key, but only in editors where you could customize it to go in steps of four columns. This still caused problems looking at the text in other programs which did not have such an option.
So I switched to spaces. Now I know my formatting will look the same regardless of what program is displaying it.
For backward compatibility, I still have Emacs configured to sniff the file on opening; if it detects tabs, then the tab key generates tabs in that buffer, otherwise pressing tab inserts spaces.
This issue concerns software engineering far more than computer science so you will get more passionate answers from software engineers.
The answer is to have the editor convert pressing the tab key to spaces and ban tab characters from the code. Code is often viewed using a variety of tools on different people's machines where tab may be represented as a different number of spaces. By using spaces the code is always formatted correctly no matter how its viewed. This avoids incorrectly flagging formatting errors in QA and when devs work with someone else's code it wont look like garbage on their editor.
Computer scientists don't need to concern themselves with high quality code because very few people read it or maintain it.
I also remember a stackoverflow survey that correlated preference for spaces with more open source contributions, and higher salary.
@@hielke2332 which is a bit funny considering Linux style forces tabs and treating tab as 8 spaces.
There's an argument to be made that for blind programmers tabs are much better than space for screen readers. Also people consider the configurability of the tab length to be a feature not an issue.
@@bosstowndynamics5488 No, they can't, because spaces are also used for alignment. Web developers understood the importance of separating a document's *meaning* from its context-specific *presentation* decades ago, and the rest of you still haven't grokked this incredibly simple and vital concept.
The consequence of TAB VS SPACE is shown in silicon valley very nicely
Not really, no one presses space 8 times.
@NEON SONIC ALPHA yes
Spaces, because they look consistent across all viewers and editors. Almost nobody presses 4 spaces, editors do that for you.
No, they don't.
The spaces in Noto have a different width than the spaces in Fira.
@@davidwuhrer6704 this seems like a troll, but I will feed it: I meant consistent relatively to other characters in the same program, whereas tabs are sometimes set to take place of 2, 4, or even 8 characters depending on the program, or command line tool (like 'git diff').
@ Tabs don't have a size as such, they align along vertical lines.
If you mean indentation: That should be measured in points, not characters.
`git diff` pipes output through `less` (unless configured otherwise), and you can set tabwidth in `less` with an environment variable. You can also set tabstops in most terminals using the `cols` command, but `less` ignores that.
@M. de k. Fonts don't do aligning.
@@davidwuhrer6704 yeah I am aware that you could possibly configure it in every single tool that you use. But then there still is going to be some gitlab, github, or bitbucket service, which will again do it differently, and at that point I say, I'll just use spaces.
Can you make a video about indentation styles, coding standards and the history and uses of some of them? That would be amazing!
Also: "I just press the tab button and hope for the best ... sometimes it works"
Is so perfectly British!
I'm a tabs man, but as Prof. Brailsford points out, there are often times when it just doesn't work properly between editors. Spaces always seem to be handled consistently.
Try maintaining code that's been around for more than a year or two and that has been modified by several people, all of whom have different ideas about spacing. And no, "Just Refactor It" doesn't solve the problem either - because new bugs, expense, et. al.
NOBODY actually presses space each time they want to indent, they just set the editor to insert the spaces when the tab key is pressed.
Yes, and some editors automatically indent after you type "{" or ":
...unless you use 2 spaces and reaching over to the tab key is not worth it.
So.... Tabs?
@@briansonof No. A tab is the TAB character \011, space is \040. This is stored in a completely different way. When you bind the tab key to a number of spaces, those spaces are stored, not the tab character.
It seems that people answered two different questions here:
1. What keyboard key do you use for indentation?
2. What character do you use to represent indentation in the files?
Depending on the editor, the answers aren't necessarily coupled.
Tab key, with the editor setup to recognize the language and map the tab key to the proper auto-indent macro (I use emacs, but I'm sure other editors can do this as well). And the auto-indent macro inserts the correct number of spaces, so when others open the file in their editor, it still appears similarly.
Tabs
Space
@@jdmnissan taba
Says the dude with a profile picture of SPACE! xD
tabs and spaces, depending on mood
@@europeansovietunion7372 ;(
Spaces. Makes the appearance consistent across different user desktops and user settings regardless of the individuals settings.
That defies the reason, individual settings exist. Tabs!
The horizontal tab is ASCII character 9, and Unicode U+0009.
Setting your tab stop to whatever width works for you, once, means I'm not forcing my indentation preference on you or anyone else, and by using tabs instead of spaces you aren't forcing yours on me.
Set your tab stop and use tabs; it's more polite.
Tabs 4 Ever.
1) customizable indentation in an editor
2) special characters that can be searched for and used for things, such as delineating columns in a CSV-file
3) perfect text alignment in word processing applications
4) faster than using multiple spaces
0:28 has the best answer I've ever heard in my life. I've been using spaces for a long time, just because most people in my career history used spaces. Never got a real answer, but for consistency's sake I've stuck with spaces. Semantically we all should be using tabs and, as he said, you can later adjust tab sizes for your personal preference, but with spaces you can't really do that. I've been converted!
Soft tabs! I would never press the space button multiple times, but I prefer to have spaces because then you can move the cursor in straight lines. As opposed to tabs where the cursor aligns with the beginning of the tab.
So agree
I just press down spacebar and hold it long enough to insert 4 characters. Single button press ftw.
How does your editor when the cursor down to an empty line and then go up again? Magic!?!? Decent editors store the column when cursor is moving horizontally and do not modify It when cursor is moving vertically.
I was self-taught as a programmer until uni, and at first I used Windows Notepad and never indented. Years later, when I started writing code for other people to learn from, I realized no one else could easily read my code, so I started indenting with spaces, because Notepad's tabs are all kinds of way too wide. When I switched to Notepad++, I still used spaces out of habit. It wasn't until I got my first professional job in the industry, and started using VSCode, that I switched to using tabs all the time. So, yeah, it definitely depends on (a) who you're writing code for, (b) what language you're using, and (c) what IDE you're using.
I just press tab and the editor will insert 2 or 4 spaces depending on the language and/or some linter will keep the styling consistent. In Go that turns out to be actual tab characters because that's the convention there, everywhere else it's usually spaces.
tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.
so use spaces for aligning parameters split over multiple lines, tabs for the standard indentation.
Argument: you can have your own personal tab size, but alignment has to be exactly the right place.
Or even simpler: tabs for indentation, and no alignement.
Wait - do people that prefer tabs assume that people who use spaces have to press space three extra times to indent their code? That can't be right, surely.
I get the feeling there are a surprising number of people who've never seen an IDE
I've never really understood the question; Does it mean they have the 'tab indentation' in the code, or that they use the tab key to indent?
I don't know any code editor I've used in the last many years that actually have the tab indentation anymore, like how Microsoft Word and similar does indentation
@@modernkennnern Another comment here got it right. I'll bet most people who think they're using TABs are actually using spaces courtesy of their editor.
@@modernkennnern How do you write your makefiles?
@@jordanzimmerman7590 Not even an IDE - just a text editor that you press TAB in :grin:
the button but its converted to 4 spaces when saved to disk. that way you don't have issues with mixing the two.
At TU Graz we learn to use spaces, and in some courses it's also graded.
To me it's clearly spaces, because you can just set your editor to make 4 (or any number you want) spaces by pressing tab, and it will look the same on every editor.
Big proponent of "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment"
often you need to align something and spaces will reliably do it, but this way it also gives you all the bonuses of tabs.
Haskell: what are tabs? They just make my compiler explode
tabs for indentation and spaces for aligning is best. but it's hard to check if if you did it right (especially if the editor also formats automatically), so i uses spaces for both. my tab key inserts multiple spaces
It amazes me that no one explained why this debate is a thing and why the char to be saved is preferably the space. Since I started, almost 20 years ago, any coding software would convert tabs for spaces to maintain visual coherence between different systems. Different coding softwares could render the tab differently prompting a second dev to change indentation only to be changed again by the original dev. To avoid this back and forward, a standard space was used.
So you're saying people should set their tab width properly? :)
With a decent editor it literally doesn't matter. I prefer spaces because it makes sure that the display of code is consistent everywhere, but with my editor the editor experience is no different. The tab key indents to the next tab stop and removes until the previous tab stop. I don't mind if you use tabs for indentation, just don't mix them. (Tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment is perfectly fine though.)
I bet a bunch of the tabs people are using spaces and don't even realize it.
It's like they were answering tab key vs space key instead of tab chars vs space chars
I really hate to find out that I used spaces accidentally.
In my experience spaces are preferred in professional world. Probably the reason being that code is more often shared between multiple Devs. (I'm assuming that this might not be the same in the academic world) Not to mention that often linters are used to maintain a shared style. Probably in the academic world they just don't bother about it. The point of having to hit many time the space bar is silly because pretty much all editors are configured so that you can hit tab and X spaces are inserted.
I would answer with a question: Proportional or fixed character width font?
Use tabs with proportional fonts in text documents and use spaces (inserted with the tab key) with fixed character width fonts in code. When quoting code in documents, use the coding standard for code blocks.
absolutely in awe they think that using spaces means pressing the space bar n times. people who use spaces just press tab
Next question needs to be: "How wide are the tab stops?" or "How many spaces?"
How wide are the tab stops? Whatever you want them to be. They are tabs.
How many spaces? Let the flame wars begin.
4 for code, but 2 for xml-ish
8
I generally stick to PSR-2 so I'm a spacer. But the misconception here is that people DO NOT press 4 times! Hit once and the editor gives 4 spaces and auto-aligns.
I code using the tab key to quickly indent and deindent. It's nice that it also works on block selections of code. But I let the IDE deduce (or decide) whether it should actually put spaces or not, because different languages and projects usually have a different convention in this.
People answering "It takes more presses" don't realize that nobody uses the spacebar to indent, just maps the tab key to insert N spaces. It then is formatted correctly throughout.
what I'm hearing with this is everyone should use tabs with their editor set to display N spaces.
the real criminals are IDE creators who dont auto convert and Python creators
White space for syntax is evil
There is also the estoteric whitespace language that also makes whitespace characters meaningful semantically in programs
Use a curly brace lib
@@Mtaalas Luckily, Python’s use of whitespace is pretty much consistent with my formatting conventions anyway.
I do still put in “#end” comment lines. If nothing else, it gives Emacs something to jump to, so I can quickly move between the beginning and ending of a block just by looking for lines with the same indentation level.
So glad for white space indentation. No arguments about where brackets go, and I don’t have to spend forever making sure my brackets are all closed properly. Not that I can’t work my way through it, but damn was that always annoying when editing existing code. I get to spend my time being productive rather than dealing with formalities. Even if I don’t agree with the way things look it’s nice to know that you can’t have idiots not indenting their code and getting away with it.
There's a difference between the spacebar and tab keys, and the tab and space characters, hence the confusion. I have vim setup to insert spaces when I hit the tab key.
The number of people answering tabs is odd to me as I seem to come across spaces more often in codebases. The reason I switched to spaces was because of the large number of codebases I found with spaces instead of tabs. Maybe a lot of people were thinking about the tab key vs the spacebar key, in which case the tab key is always the most sensible option.
I prefer tabs, but I use a tab width of two because the default (four or was it even eight early on) is usually too much, two spaces are enough to clearly identify indentation and not making lines unnecessarily long with multiple indentations. AND I mention it in the documents that the code is originally formatted with a two-space tab indentation.
Next Q&A should be what editor they use.
That would be very revealing
I sense it's Notepad :D
Some has got to say *nano*
I'm gonna get hate but atom or VS
The edit command from MsDOS
I use the tabs button, but I set all my editors to convert those automatically to spaces so it's just one button press and it's more consistent across editors and systems.
Until you backspace and have to delete individual spaces instead of a single tab character
How many spaces?
@@koga7349 But why would you use backspace? All sane editors allow to change indentation level, like Shift-Tab in SublimeText.
@@trefmanic I know you can shift + tab but you should be able to use backspace also. You can with tabs. One less thing you can do with spaces
Nobody besides Bagley and Brailsford mentioned anything about the history of alignment differences. Only mono-spaced / fixed-width terminal fonts (like Courier) would not be affected by this. In the context of a word processor we usually use proportional fonts, so 4 spaces in 1 font would align differently than in another font, but Tab means fixed-width Indentation (regardless of font) - something entirely different than X number of spaces. BTW one Tab in hex is 0x09, and one Space is 0x20. The conversion is up to the program/settings. Also if you had bandwidth/space concerns, but uncompressed Ascii encoding was required, one 0x09 tab is more efficient than multiple spaces (0x20 0x20 0x20 0x20).
I like tabs but when you open in a different editor it can look odd if the tab spacing settings are different. Sometimes with spaces, depending on the font (if it isn't a monospace type) the indentation can be all over the place.
all the plebs saying _"tabs because I don't want to press space a bunch of times"_ should go on strike until the sweatshop owner that employs them buys a real editor and they can stop indenting their code manually
Yeah I also don't get how people still use that argument. Are they writing code in Notepad? Also, auto-indentation and auto-formatting have been in programming editors since the advent of vim (and probably much earlier) so you rarely even need to press tab.
To be fair, even the best editors can screw up indentation at times while you're in the process of deleting and editing code, and then you need to manually fix it. (Or trigger an auto-format of the document, but then it might reformat other parts of the code and bloat your diffs.)
all free editors (that do not come bundled with windows) are already sane.
These are the real questions we should be asking.
You should totally ask these geniuses for their favourite text editor. I would love to know!
Yes
If I open someone else's code, I'll use whatever they used. If I'm in the Arduino IDE, it's spaces [always 2 spaces]. If I'm in Visual Studio, it's usually tabs if I'm starting from scratch. Otherwise it depends on my mood. But I try to be consistent within one file/project